The Phantoms and the future of Nalthian militaries

[Nightstar The Bright]

Kalad’s Phantoms are large lifeless made from bones encased in stone, due to this weapons are virtually useless against them, and they are far stronger and more dangerous then other lifeless.

Hallandren acquired these Phantoms after the Pahn Kahl rebellion, and used them effectively against the regular lifeless army. From what we saw Susebron is fairly peaceful and is unlikely to use these phantoms to conquer other nations. 

This means that the Phantoms will simply be standing around in Hallandren, while the news about these reborn/recalled Phantoms spreads. Eventually, although it might take a while, other nations will realise what they are, either through experimentation or spionage, and build their own. At this point most of the Nalthian kingdoms will have Phantoms replacing their regular lifeless.

This will change how warfare is practised on Nalthis, regular humans becoming even less important. Nations from other planets will also have trouble fighting with Nalthian kingdoms, as many nations don’t have access to this kind of firepower, although some invested arts might destroy this advantage. 

Even with the inevitable discovery of guns and artillery Phantoms will stay the main troops used, stone is still far more resistant to bullets then flesh, although their importance might go down.

 

[alder24]

1 hour ago, Nightstar The Bright said:

Kalad’s Phantoms are large lifeless made from bones encased in stone, due to this weapons are virtually useless against them, and they are far stronger and more dangerous then other lifeless.

Hallandren acquired these Phantoms after the Pahn Kahl rebellion, and used them effectively against the regular lifeless army. From what we saw Susebron is fairly peaceful and is unlikely to use these phantoms to conquer other nations. 

This means that the Phantoms will simply be standing around in Hallandren, while the news about these reborn/recalled Phantoms spreads. Eventually, although it might take a while, other nations will realise what they are, either through experimentation or spionage, and build their own. At this point most of the Nalthian kingdoms will have Phantoms replacing their regular lifeless.

Well, technically what everyone would know is that Susebron, who has more than 50000 Breaths, Awakened all stone statues and made them fight. Not that they're Lifeless. Only like 4 people know what they are. Kalad's Phantoms were used 300 years ago, there were at least 4 people who knew about them and knew how they were made and yet they didn't become widespread. People witnessed them in action, saw them in battle, saw them moving, yet they were forgotten.

Plus they are extremely expensive. You don't need just Breaths to Awaken bones, you need Breaths to Awaken stone, Breaths that would act like sinew to enable movement. That's not something that everyone can afford. It's cheaper and better to make an army Lifeless that can serve as servants or city guards than just a dozen of Phantoms. Regular Lifeless won't be replaced, they are just too cheap and too multifunctional.

Spoiler

DylanHuebner

I was wondering how the animation of the lifeless statues worked, in regard to the use of Susebron's Breath. If they were lifeless, then vasher wouldn't have been able to take his Breath back out of them, nor would susebron have needed such a great deal of breath to revive them—he just would have needed a password. But if they were simply Awakened, no password would have been necessary to animate the statues, just Breath and Command.

It seems like the statues could be neither lifeless nor awakened. Are they unique, because of the use of bone, or am I missing something? The only other explanation I could think of was that they were lifeless, but Susebron's breath wasn't used to activate the statues, he simply had it passed down from vasher, in addition to the statues. If that's the case(and then I've simply been confusing myself with unnecessary, convoluted logic), why was it necessary to keep the breath safe for all these years?

Brandon Sanderson

Wow, there are a lot of questions in there. If you follow the drafts, I think you can see the evolution of what became of the Lifeless army. Originally I had planned for the statues to simply have been placed there so that you could Awaken them—just in my original concepts, before I started the writing—and then that became the army.

I eventually decided that didn't work for various reasons. Number one, as I developed the magic system, Awakening stone doesn't work very well. You've got to have limberness, you've got to have motion to something for it to actually be stronger. So a soldier made out of cloth would be more useful to you than a soldier made out of stone, if you were just Awakening something. At that point, as I was developing this, I went back to the drawing board and said okay, I need to leave him a whole group of really cool Lifeless as the army. But that had problems in that the ichor would not have stayed good long enough. Plus they already had a pretty big Lifeless army, so what was special about this one? Remember, I'm revising concepts like this as the book is going along. You can see where in the story I could see what needed to be there. So I went back to the drawing board again.

I think the original draft of WARBREAKER you can download off my website has them just as statues, though at the time when I was writing that I already knew it would need to change. I was just sticking to my outline because I needed to have the whole thing complete on the page before I could work with it. A lot of times that's how I do things as a writer—I get the rough draft down, and then I begin to sculpt.

I eventually developed essentially what you've just outlined in the first part, before you started worrying if you were too convoluted. I said, well, what if there's a hybrid? What happens if you Awaken bones? Can you create something? The reason that you can't draw the Breath back from a Lifeless is because the Breath clings to it. If the Lifeless were sentient enough, it could give up its own Breath, but you can't take it, just like you can't take a Breath from a person by force. You have to get them to give it up willingly. So it sticks to the Lifeless. A Lifeless is, let's say, 90% of a sentient being. The Breath doesn't manifest in them, because they aren't alive, yet they're almost there. A stone statue brought to life would be way down on the bottom rung.

Is there something in between? That's the advancement I had Vasher discover—what if we build something out of bone, but then encase it in stone to make it strong, and build it in ways that the bone is held together by the force of the Breaths? That's really what you're getting at there, that you need a lot of Breath, a lot of power, to hold all that stone together. There are seams at the joints. What the Breath is doing is clinging there like magical sinew, and it's holding all of that together.

Vasher left the Phantoms Invested with enough Breath to hold them together but not to move. You needed another big, substantial influx of Breath in order to actually make them have motion, to bring them enough strength to move and that sort of thing. So it's kind of a hybrid.

Goodreads Fantasy Book Discussion Warbreaker Q&A (Jan. 18, 2010)

 

1 hour ago, Nightstar The Bright said:

This will change how warfare is practised on Nalthis, regular humans becoming even less important. Nations from other planets will also have trouble fighting with Nalthian kingdoms, as many nations don’t have access to this kind of firepower, although some invested arts might destroy this advantage. 

Even with the inevitable discovery of guns and artillery Phantoms will stay the main troops used, stone is still far more resistant to bullets then flesh, although their importance might go down.

The creation of tanks, who are just like Phantoms, did not make infantry obsolete. There are multiple ways to immobilize a Phantom - Awakened ropes, stones and rocks being thrown at them, hammers or pickaxes etc. They aren't that indestructible. If you use them alone, without any support, they will be defeated, just like tanks with no support are super vulnerable.

[Nightstar The Bright]

8 hours ago, alder24 said:

Well, technically what everyone would know is that Susebron, who has more than 50000 Breaths, Awakened all stone statues and made them fight. Not that they're Lifeless. Only like 4 people know what they are. Kalad's Phantoms were used 300 years ago, there were at least 4 people who knew about them and knew how they were made and yet they didn't become widespread. People witnessed them in action, saw them in battle, saw them moving, yet they were forgotten

We don’t know how long Vasher had his Phantoms before he went to war, and how long the people remembered what they were, but a fairly high tech(higher then manywar tech) Nalthis should be able to mop up how they work in a hundred years or so

 

9 hours ago, alder24 said:

Well, technically what everyone would know is that Susebron, who has more than 50000 Breaths, Awakened all stone statues and made them fight. Not that they're Lifeless. Only like 4 people know what they are. Kalad's Phantoms were used 300 years ago, there were at least 4 people who knew about them and knew how they were made and yet they didn't become widespread. People witnessed them in action, saw them in battle, saw them moving, yet they were forgotten

Uhh no? You don’t need to awaken the stone, if that would be needed even Susebron couldn’t have awakened a thousand of them. You need to use the breath to make a sort of sinew. Another advantage of the Phantoms lies in that you can reclaim the breaths, you don’t need them active during wartime, this doesn’t work with regular lifeless. While yes they are still very expensive, I think they aren’t expensive enough where smaller nations wouldn’t make them. No, regular lifeless wouldn’t be replaced completely, they would still be used, just less because Phantoms will takeover the whole ‘go and storm that place’.

 

9 hours ago, alder24 said:

The creation of tanks, who are just like Phantoms, did not make infantry obsolete. There are multiple ways to immobilize a Phantom - Awakened ropes, stones and rocks being thrown at them, hammers or pickaxes etc. They aren't that indestructible. If you use them alone, without any support, they will be defeated, just like tanks with no support are super vulnerable

Actually though, Phantoms are a whole lot cheaper then tanks, they also don’t require humans inside them to operate. Phantoms are a little like shardbearers (with plate) in this regard, they are very strong and can wreak havoc, but yeah they’re not invincible. 

[alder24]

5 hours ago, Nightstar The Bright said:

We don’t know how long Vasher had his Phantoms before he went to war, and how long the people remembered what they were, but a fairly high tech(higher then manywar tech) Nalthis should be able to mop up how they work in a hundred years or so

Phantoms were actively involved in the warfare and there were 3 other brilliant scholars who survived the Manywar that knew about them, yet they didn't bother to recreate them. The only thing that was remembered about them are legends, which clearly speak about their destructive power, indicating people saw them in action.

5 hours ago, Nightstar The Bright said:

Uhh no? You don’t need to awaken the stone, if that would be needed even Susebron couldn’t have awakened a thousand of them. You need to use the breath to make a sort of sinew.

That's what I've meant. You need two substantial influxes of Breaths - first large one to Awaken Lifeless bones (which needs tens of Breaths per Lifeless and not retrievable), second one to create sinew holding the stone together. Either the second one is done by Awakening the stone itself (possible) or by doing something extra and special with Lifeless, it's still very expensive to make. You need a lot of Breaths for both of those.

And if the second Awakening is not done by Awakening the stone, that means Vasher discovered a new way of Awakening Lifeless, something unique and different that works with Lifeless and allows you to recall some Breaths. You can't recall Breaths you've used to Awaken a Lifeless, those aren't yours anymore, they don't have your Identity. What Vasher did was something very difficult and different, not easy to recreate - if it's not simple Awakening of stone (because Awakening stone doesn't mean it has to be super expensive like Nightblood - they have a human shape and bones as the focus, they would be cheaper, but still require lot of Breaths).

People won't be able to create their own Phantoms if they won't figure out the way Vasher did it and for all they know, Susebron just Awakened stone statues, not Lifeless.  They will never know. Just knowing what Phantoms really are isn't enough - you need to know precise Command structure, precise way of visualization, both are something that they won't be able to figure out just like that. ch 46:

Quote

"This area is where you really begin to understand how little we know. There are probably thousands of Commands we don’t know. The more words you add, the more complicated the mental component becomes, which is why discovering a new Command can take years of study.”
[...]
"The thing to understand is that we’re still children when it comes to Awakening. It doesn’t help that a lot of people who learn new, valuable Commands never share them, and probably die with the knowledge.”

 

5 hours ago, Nightstar The Bright said:

Another advantage of the Phantoms lies in that you can reclaim the breaths, you don’t need them active during wartime, this doesn’t work with regular lifeless.

A regular Lifeless requires 1 Breath, Phantoms require 50 or even 100. Those Breaths you won't ever get back. You can only retake some of the Breaths working as joints, but not everything as you need to leave something to still hold the stone together. ch 46:

Quote

“Type Two BioChromatic entities,” he said, “are what people in Hallandren call Lifeless. They are different from Type One entities in several ways. Lifeless can be created at will, and require only a few Breaths to Awaken— anywhere between one and hundreds, depending on the Commands used— and they feed off of their own color when being Invested. They don’t present an aura when Awakened, but the Breath sustains them, keeping them from needing to eat. They can die, and need a special alcohol solution to remain functional past a few years of Awakened status. Because of their organic host, their Breath clings to the body, and cannot be withdrawn once Invested.”

[...]

“What about bones?” Vivenna asked.
“They’re strange,” Vasher said. “They take far more Breath to awaken than a body held together with flesh and aren’t as flexible as something like cloth. Still, Breath will stick to them fairly easily, since they were once alive and maintain the form of a living thing.”
“So Idrian stories that talk about skeletal armies aren’t just fabrications?” He chuckled.
“Oh, they are. If you wanted to Awaken a skeleton, you’d have to arrange all the bones together in their correct places. That’s a lot of work for something that will take upwards of fifty or a hundred Breaths to Awaken. Intact corpses make far more sense economically, even if the Breath sticks to them so well that it becomes impossible to recover. Still, I’ve seen some very interesting things done with skeletons which have been Awakened."

 

5 hours ago, Nightstar The Bright said:

While yes they are still very expensive, I think they aren’t expensive enough where smaller nations wouldn’t make them.

No. A small nation won't be able to afford to lose tens or hundreds of Breaths to make a single Lifeless, they would prefer to create regular Lifeless because they would be more numerous and more useful to them than a single Phantom.

 

Edit: You can put full plate armor on Lifeless and you have a force as invulnerable as Phantoms, but costing only 1 Breath each. 

Edited December 2, 2023 by alder24

[Nightstar The Bright]

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

Phantoms were actively involved in the warfare and there were 3 other brilliant scholars who survived the Manywar that knew about them, yet they didn't bother to recreate them. The only thing that was remembered about them are legends, which clearly speak about their destructive power, indicating people saw them in action.

We don’t know whether the other scholars knew what they were. Nonetheless this doesn’t disprove my point, a higher tech Nalthis will likely mop up how they work within a hundred years or so (spionage/stealing plans etc) 

 

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

That's what I've meant. You need two substantial influxes of Breaths - first large one to Awaken Lifeless bones (which needs tens of Breaths per Lifeless and not retrievable), second one to create sinew holding the stone together. Either the second one is done by Awakening the stone itself (possible) or by doing something extra and special with Lifeless, it's still very expensive to make. You need a lot of Breaths for both of those.

Ahh, well true. But you only have to do the second one in times of war.

 

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

And if the second Awakening is not done by Awakening the stone, that means Vasher discovered a new way of Awakening Lifeless, something unique and different that works with Lifeless and allows you to recall some Breaths. You can't recall Breaths you've used to Awaken a Lifeless, those aren't yours anymore, they don't have your Identity. What Vasher did was something very difficult and different, not easy to recreate - if it's not simple Awakening of stone (because Awakening stone doesn't mean it has to be super expensive like Nightblood - they have a human shape and bones as the focus, they would be cheaper, but still require lot of Breaths).

People won't be able to create their own Phantoms if they won't figure out the way Vasher did it and for all they know, Susebron just Awakened stone statues, not Lifeless.  They will never know. Just knowing what Phantoms really are isn't enough - you need to know precise Command structure, precise way of visualization, both are something that they won't be able to figure out just like that

Fair, I hadn’t thought about the whole sinew thing being really hard to figure out.

 

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

No. A small nation won't be able to afford to lose tens or hundreds of Breaths to make a single Lifeless, they would prefer to create regular Lifeless because they would be more numerous and more useful to them than a single Phantom.

Well that depends on how many citizens it has, small countries can have many people.  Also I don’t think you can say that they would prefer regular lifeless. It depends on their tactics and technologies and the terrain as well as the amounts of breaths required to make Phantoms.

 

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

You can put full plate armor on Lifeless and you have a force as invulnerable as Phantoms, but costing only 1 Breath each. 

That’s really not true, full plate isn’t nearly as strong as straight up stone. Does make me wonder though, do lifeless need to see to fight? Like do they need visors or not, and how does this work in the Phantoms.

[alder24]

1 hour ago, Nightstar The Bright said:

That’s really not true, full plate isn’t nearly as strong as straight up stone.

Stone is brittle, metal, especially hardened steel isn't. Stone will crack and shatter, metal will only dent. Metal is strong and it’s better as armor. Full plate armor provides excellent protection against any kind of weapons - it's not just a plate, there is padding and chainmail underneath it. You are basically invulnerable in it. It's really hard to kill someone in full plate armor. Therefore yes, full plate armor provides almost as good protection as stone, in some cases even better (because it won't shatter). 

1 hour ago, Nightstar The Bright said:

Does make me wonder though, do lifeless need to see to fight? Like do they need visors or not, and how does this work in the Phantoms.

Yes, they need to see. Phantoms see like other Awakened objects, Mistborn spoilers WoB:

Spoiler

Questioner

In Awakening an object when you give it the sort of Command like, go get the keys, or something. How does that object perceive the world around it? Since it doesn't have standard human senses, how does it see? How does it touch?

Brandon Sanderson

It is not--

Moderator

Repeat the question.

Brandon Sanderson

Oh… go ahead.

Moderator

The question was, how do Awakened objects actually perceive the world.

Brandon Sanderson

…The closest correlation you have to this is how Inquisitors see.

Questioner

Okay, following up on that say, someone who has-- say someone with bronze who-- a bronze Misting managed to somehow get access to Breath and Awaken would he then be able to tell that object "Hey I sense this Allomancer over there, can you find it".

Brandon Sanderson

That is not outside the realm of possibility.

JordanCon 2016 (April 23, 2016)

 

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson

Lightsong Sees the Lifeless and Takes Command of Them

They keep them in the dark. This is a bad idea. They don't realize it, but the Lifeless are far more aware than everyone assumes. Clod in this book is a foreshadowing of that, and there won't be much more about it in the rest of the novel. It's one of the focus points for the sequel, if I ever write it. (Which will actually have a Lifeless as a viewpoint character, if I can find a way to swing it.)

Warbreaker Annotations (March 21, 2011)

 

[Nightstar The Bright]

3 hours ago, alder24 said:

Stone is brittle, metal, especially hardened steel isn't. Stone will crack and shatter, metal will only dent. Metal is strong and it’s better as armor. Full plate armor provides excellent protection against any kind of weapons - it's not just a plate, there is padding and chainmail underneath it. You are basically invulnerable in it. It's really hard to kill someone in full plate armor. Therefore yes, full plate armor provides almost as good protection as stone, in some cases even better (because it won't shatter). 

Now either I’m overestimating the thickness of the stone or your underestimating it. Stone, smooth and round, is really hard to break (requiring actual effort with something like a pickaxe) steel might also be hard, but it bends fairly easily. Also Phantoms and a regular lifeless are not comparable, Phantoms are twice as tall and far stronger and also way heavier. Any phantom will easily kill a regular lifeless, even with full plate. This is one of the few weaknesses of plate, it protects well from sharp edges, but blunt force will still hurt, even with a gambeson underneath, getting tossed around or hit by a beast with the strength of a Phantom will still break bones and cause internal bleeding. Crushing a lifeless shouldn’t be to hard, considering your a Phantom of some 4 meters tall and made of solid rock. Yes a regular lifeless encased in steel would do better then one encased in stone, but Phantoms aren’t regular.

 

3 hours ago, alder24 said:

Yes, they need to see. Phantoms see like other Awakened objects

But they don’t need visors, that will significantly help with protecting the lifeless. No breathing, no visor = only areas open for mobility.

[alder24]

13 hours ago, Nightstar The Bright said:

Now either I’m overestimating the thickness of the stone or your underestimating it. Stone, smooth and round, is really hard to break (requiring actual effort with something like a pickaxe) steel might also be hard, but it bends fairly easily. Also Phantoms and a regular lifeless are not comparable, Phantoms are twice as tall and far stronger and also way heavier. Any phantom will easily kill a regular lifeless, even with full plate. This is one of the few weaknesses of plate, it protects well from sharp edges, but blunt force will still hurt, even with a gambeson underneath, getting tossed around or hit by a beast with the strength of a Phantom will still break bones and cause internal bleeding. Crushing a lifeless shouldn’t be to hard, considering your a Phantom of some 4 meters tall and made of solid rock. Yes a regular lifeless encased in steel would do better then one encased in stone, but Phantoms aren’t regular.

It depends on the type of stone we're talking about. Some are more brittle, others are less. We don't know what type of stone Vasher used. Generally stone will break, crack, splinter or even shatter if hit well enough. Doing that to a hardened steel armor is much, much harder. It can dent, sure, but it's really hard to pierce it - it requires a specific type of weapon and it still isn't enough to hurt or kill because the opening is usually small and there are multiple layers underneath the plate. Sure, blunt force is the most effective against plate armor, but so it is against stone and bones encased in stone can still be broken that way.

Where did you get Phantoms being twice as tall or 4 meters tall? There is nothing like that in books. Phantoms are described as large, sometimes oversized - they are larger than humans, but not that big. They have human bones inside, they can't be 4 meters tall because bones wouldn't fit. I imagine them being at most as large as Returned, which is around 2 meters tall. Still large and bigger than humans, but their bones can form a full and functional skeleton.

I also didn't want to pitch a Phantom against a Lifeless in plate armor. That's not a competition, Lifeless would be tossed around like a doll. I simply stated that if you want to have invulnerable force just give Lifeless plate armor. It provides excellent protection and it makes killing them really hard. Not every army on Nalthis is made out of Lifeless, Idris is an excellent example of one such force. Most countries aren't wealthy enough to afford a Lifeless army. Hallandren seems to be unique in this as its army is composed primarily out of Lifeless - they are rich, they can afford it. For others it's much more difficult. Even during the Manywar, many combatants were living, not Lifeless. During the Battle of Twilight Falls most, or maybe even majority of fighters were alive (Lightsong description of painting, ch 26). Normally Lifeless would be facing either a living opponent or another Lifeless and for that having plate armor is ideal. 

Phantoms are still superior in combat, but extremely costly. Not only do you need to have an excellent Awakener, but also hundreds of Breaths per Phantom. To add more, the stone can't be just some random stone, you need to have skilled stonemasons carving the shapes for you and that can take decades. Phantoms are a masterwork. 

13 hours ago, Nightstar The Bright said:

But they don’t need visors, that will significantly help with protecting the lifeless. No breathing, no visor = only areas open for mobility.

Lifeless don't breathe as well. They need to only see. And for that there are many different kinds of visors, like vertical short slits, round dotted holes or thin horizontal slits. Not to mention how hard it is to slip a knife into the visor of a moving and fighting person - you're dead before you can get that close.

Joints are well protected in plate armor. They're not exposed but they are nonetheless a weakness. 

However Phantoms also have to have joints. They can't be a solid, stiff statue, they have to have movable parts, be able to bend, twist and turn. Those parts are weak, especially against blunt force.

[Duxredux he/him]

I'll pitch in a few notes addressing @Nightstar The Bright's original post concept, though a few aren't too different from some of @alder24's points. Kalad's Phantoms can really only function as an infantry unit. They have crippling drawbacks as naval or air force units and they introduce a major weight component to transporting them with any method other than their own feet. They are unlikely to be able to climb trees or any weak structures, and would not be able to climb siege ladders when attacking a fortified position. Perhaps they could operate as archers, but then you're losing the advantage they provide as shock troops. In the same way that you can design traps specifically for heavy vehicles like tanks that ignore lighter infantry, you can also create traps that selectively target the Phantoms. Dig a pit trap and I'm not sure if they could climb out - not because they aren't strong enough but because the earth is too weak to support them. Dropping large rocks on them from murder holes should still work to defend fortified locations. Furthermore, the Phantoms in the most recent era were only deployed against a rogue army of Lifeless that was missing its entire living command and support staff which they were never meant to be deployed without, so the army of 40,000 standard Lifeless had no one to give adaptive commands to fight the Phantoms. There were no Awakeners to use ropes as siege equipment to pummel the Phantoms with boulders, no cases of utilizing terrain advantage to fight an incredibly heavy foe. The Phantoms are really strong and really tough to beat, yes, but they certainly aren't insurmountable, particularly for combatants that can think for themselves. They can march and fight tirelessly and once made are pretty low maintenance, but they certainly don't make the rest of military strategy obsolete.

Separate from their effectiveness is the terrible risk they represent. That whole debacle of the entire Hallendren Lifeless army of 40,000 getting stolen and sent to destroy another country is a huge red flag in the history of Nalthis for anyone basing their army too heavily on Lifeless. By necessity, the people giving orders to the Lifeless have to know the command structure within the living ranks and have at least sub-level security phrases for the Lifeless. All of Blushweaver's worries about the divided army and Lightsong eventually giving up the security phrases while under duress are very real issues with a Lifeless-based military regardless of if they are Phantoms or not. Had Bluefingers turned the Lifeless against Hallendren, I'm not quite sure if Hallendren would have survived. Susebron may not have had time to activate the Phantoms stationed throughout the city while the army was running rampant and slaughtering his people. I do think that the Phantoms destroying the Hallendren army did permanently change the future of Nalthian militaries, but not necessarily in the way that you first posited.